Formed by Song: How Music Shapes the Christian Life

Few things express our individual experience like music. Take the popularity of Spotify Wrapped, with its 200 million users sharing their year in music, complete with:

• Listening Age – the age Spotify thinks you are based on your most played songs.

• Clubs – six personality-driven communities with assigned “roles”.

• Listening Archive – a chronological record of your listening history.

• Wrapped Parties – competitions with up to nine friends for unique awards.

Age, a specified role within an assigned community, even a time-stamped catalogue of our lived experience via song––these are basic components of identity. And, as Andrew Root claims, modern identity wouldn’t be complete without a way to perform. Wrapped offers yet another way to share your identity (and even compete!) with others––albeit an identity collapsed down to data on our musical preferences.

While this is largely a harmless and entertaining marketing hook, it highlights the profound connection between music and identity formation. But it also reinforces the broader trend which encourages the reduction of identity to mere metrics. Metrics that categorize us, give us a sense of belonging, and are easily shareable (thus the identity we post can be easily “confirmed” by others’ likes).

So while we should not seek to be defined solely by our musical preferences, we should certainly use them intentionally for our formation. Music is catechesis. If the goal of catechesis is disenculturation and identity formation, we must not overlook music’s powerful influence in shaping composite lives.

The Need for Composite Identity

Ross Douthat has noticed, like many others, that mystery and enchantment have been rushing back into the world, so to speak. However, this increased enchantment is playing out in various forms of mysticism and a renewed search for gnosis—some hidden truth or structure to the world. Douthat contends, then, that the current need for the church is to defend not merely the spiritual, but the religious. By that he means a defense not only of the experience of the divine but more so the ability to think rationally about it in structured and communal spaces––balancing depth and action. In other words, what we need is a bolstering of the interior life. Such a life is what Augustine referred to as the “composite” life: one characterized by a blend of contemplation and action––a life that isn’t adrift in mystic daydreaming but moves to the sound of orthodoxy.

This kind of grounded, composite life is what is needed in the face of culturally collapsed identities. Gordon Smith argues that anything less than this and we will not be able to navigate the social, cultural, and religious dynamics of a secular age with any kind of intellectual and emotional resilience.

The composite life was precisely how the early church cultivated what Rodney Stark calls “permeable boundaries”––those theological and ethical guards that helped them remain distinct as the church while meaningfully engaging the pagan world around them. These boundaries deepened their contemplation and directed their action.

But such a composite, contemplatively-active life was not created in a vacuum; it is informed and mediated by the church. And the church has had a historic tool for mediating such composite lives; namely, catechesis. I have written recently on the importance of catechesis for spiritual formation and others have written more extensively and helpfully on the subject. But one thing that can inadvertently fade into the background while ensuring doctrinal precision is the role of music.

Augustine’s Dual Purpose of Song

In his famous work Confessions, Augustine lays out two purposes for the use of hymns and singing in the church.

Consolation

Augustine says hymns should be sung so that the people do not become weak, exhausted, and depressed. Examples from literature and film abound, depicting the beautiful power of music to be balm in our suffering. One of my favorites is from The Shawshank Redemption. Prisoner Andy Dufresne is allowed some freedom in exchange for helping the warden with his accounting. While in the warden’s office, Dufresne locks the door, places a record of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro on the player, and pipes the music throughout the entire prison. This is how Redd, another prisoner, describes the music:

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't wanna know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free

This is the power of music. It transported those prisoners to a place of freedom, comfort, and beauty. But the music of life––the sounds and shapes of beauty and comfort––is increasingly muted to us. Our incessant connection to technology and the resulting anxiety has positioned us against the world in a posture of aggression.

Hartmut Rosa masterfully addresses this growing hostility and suggests we need an entirely different mode of relating to the world: what he calls resonance. In his work by that title, Rosa––interestingly––gives music specific praise for being able to “activate” resonance. Rosa says music has a unique capacity to unleash physical, emotional, and cognitive vibrations in the listener. He goes on to argue:

If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world.

We desperately need a negotiated way of relating to the world. We are in gridlock between an uncontrollable world and our obsession with trying to assert control over everything. Music is a powerful means to modify and correct this misplaced relation to the world.

Specifically, in the context of the church, music has the Spirit-infused power to initiate this negotiation. It is in the church that we encounter the ascended Christ––the one through whom the world was created––through song, word, and sacrament. Indeed, it is in the church that we, in Redd’s words, “sing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words”; namely, the Triune God.

Exhortation

Augustine understood that the singing of hymns provided theological and spiritual instruction. But how exactly does singing accomplish this pedagogic end? In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he tells the church to “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).

Paul desires the church to instruct each other through singing. They are to sing psalms—the inspired, God-breathed songs of Scripture—as well as hymns and spiritual songs, terms that together encompass the church’s sung praise shaped by the Word and the Spirit. Each of these serves as a means by which the church is instructed. Such music isn’t spiritual because we’ve used certain instruments or notes; it is spiritual when it is part of genuine worship in spirit and truth.

Music has always played a spiritually significant role in the life of God’s people. The LORD commissioned groups in Israel to ministries of music. For example, the Korahites’ sole job description was to sing to the Lord. In 2 Chronicles 20:19, they “stood up to praise the Lord, the God of Israel, with a very loud voice.”

The Korahites’ singing wasn’t just for show; their ministry had a purpose. Singing serves to refresh and reorient our souls in ways that other forms of instruction simply don’t. Singing helps us love God not only with our minds, but also with our hearts and souls and strength (Mark 12:30).

God set apart a ministry of singers to drive theological teaching deep into the hearts of his people. Singing combines the instructive seeds of biblical truths with the soul-softening ministry of music.

Looking to church history more broadly, Augustine himself––the 4th century theologian known for his Confessions and The Trinity––is an interesting case study in the power of music. Augustine was significantly shaped by the ministry and friendship of Ambrose. Ambrose was a bishop who understood the instructive power of song. Following the council of Nicaea in 325, and up against the ongoing influence of Arianism which denies the full deity of Jesus, Ambrose employed singing as one of his most potent tools against heresy. His congregation sang their Trinitarian faith and thus deepened as composite souls—not only experiencing their faith, but also learning to defend it. The music was both melody for their souls and instruction for their minds.

This was the liturgical environment that Augustine inhabited––soaring scores of Trinitarian praise. Perhaps he would have always written The Trinity, but surely his love for and thinking on his Trinitarian God was deepened by such singing. The truths sang in worship penetrated Augustine’s heart and mind.

How Then Shall We Sing?

How can we grow in this ministry of singing? How can we sing so that our minds are instructed and our souls softened?

The single, simplest, most important step is to sing with your church. This carries the double benefit of being exhorted while also being comforted, singing shoulder to shoulder with the people of God. Sing, no matter how awkward you may feel, no matter how bad it is (I am almost certainly tone-deaf). There is something unique about voices lifted in unison with praise to the LORD. Augustine said it was this corporate singing of hymns that “stir my mind to greater religious fervor and kindle in me a more ardent form of piety."

Another helpful practice is to read (and sing) the Psalms. Biblical counselor David Powlison says we should use psalms in at least two ways.

First, we should use the Psalms like classical music. This, Powlison says, is the technical, detail-oriented, word-for-word storing of psalms in the heart. When we do this, we can powerfully speak and sing the living Word of God into our hearts at a moment's notice.

Second, we should use the Psalms like jazz. When we tuck away the words of the psalms in our minds, or have them on the page in front of us, we’re free to improvise on them—adding refrains or adapting them to a certain melody—in order to drive them deeper into our hearts. One of my seminary professors began each class by having us sing psalms from the Trinity Psalter. That was by far my most formative class––and that singing is one of the only things I still remember from it.

One Scottish pastor suggested singing all of the Psalms in a year in addition to regular, systematic Bible reading. If we heeded his advice, we’d quickly become familiar with many of the Psalms and be able to “play” them like jazz as they mingle down into our hearts through melody.

The “how” is not complicated—sing with your church, sing in your home; sing hymns, sing Psalms. Let them all penetrate your heart and imagination as only music can do.

The Singing Savior

No one knows our misplaced relation to the world like Jesus does. And no one knows the remedy for such distortion like the Savior himself. He alone embodied the composite life, and everything he does––whether in his contemplation or in his action––has eternal significance, and that includes his singing.

Jesus sang with others. At the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn together (Matthew 26:30). This was most likely a portion of what’s known as the Hallel Psalms—Psalms 113–118. Jesus, the Word himself, led his disciples in singing the very Scripture he embodied. The next day, Jesus died with a psalm on his lips. He endured the cross to the sound of music, so that we might sing those same psalms with joy as God’s children.

It’s worth noting that the Psalm of the cross––Psalm 22––goes on to say that he will sing the Father’s praise in the midst of the congregation. Jesus, our divine choir director, cried the lyrics of verse 1 so he could give us new life—including voices!—and lead us in song to the LORD.

The Savior of souls was a singing soul himself. The one who turns hearts of stone into hearts of flesh gave us the gift of song to drive that gospel reality and its instructive implications deep into our souls––carrying us from gray places on the chorus of heaven.